Collaboration targets enhanced cyber defense

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) has partnered with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a means of aiding state and local governments with cyber defense efforts.

The APL and DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have enlisted the assistance of Arizona, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Texas, as well as the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) in applying Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR).

SOAR tools equip organizations with the ability to collect security-threat data through multiple sources, officials said, performing triage response actions faster than manual processes.

“The opportunity to work with state, local, tribal and territorial organizations as they adopt the IACD framework is rewarding,” said Cindy Widick, APL’s deputy principal investigator on the state, local, tribal and territorial (SLTT) pilot. “Automating low regret, high impact indicators will improve the security of their networks and alleviate some of the manual processing required today. This will allow talented network security personnel to address more complex cyber threats.”

The initiative is slated to help identify key areas for potential reduction of manual tasks promoting actionable information sharing across government levels and agencies while also identifying orchestration services needed to integrate responses.

CISA works with partners to defend against threats and collaborates to build secure and resilient infrastructures.